Major Research Areas

Upstate boasts basic and clinical researchers with diverse expertise in neuroscience, molecular genetics, genomics, epigenetics, structural biology, infectious disease, and behavior disorders. This allows students the opportunity to perform research in a wide range of research areas and easily collaborate when new expertise is needed.

Current Appointments

Hospital Campus

Research Programs and Affiliations

Research Interests

Deciphering and manipulating the cellular signaling circuits for feeding behaviors using approaches including electrophysiology, pharmacogenetics and optogenetics.

Research Abstract

Dr. Yang's laboratory seeks to dissect and manipulate the intracellular and intercellular signaling circuits controlling food intake in normal and obese animals using a bunch of approaches, including electrophysiology, opto-genetics, chemical-genetics, pharmacology, imaging and molecular biology as well as behavioral assays. Obesity and its associated complications impose a huge burden to our society, and its associated pathologies constitute a major cause of death. Also, obesity may increase the risks of many other disorders, such as type 2 diabetes. However, the mechanisms and the effective treatments of obesity still remain unclear. At its core, the obesity results from an imbalance between food intake and energy expenditure, so it is critical to study the mechanisms of food intake. Food intake is complex and multimodal. They focus on studying the neural processes controlling food intake.

Dr. Yang's lab has demonstrated that food deprivation up-regulated excitatory synaptic inputs onto AGRP neurons and down-regulated excitatory synaptic inputs onto POMC neurons in the arcuate nucleus (ARC) of hypothalamus. However, the origins of the neurons projecting to AGRP neurons or POMC neurons are still unknown. They will first explore the neuron populations and then study their functions in food intake and obesity.

Besides the neuronal regulations of food intake, he is also interested in studying the glial roles in food intake and obesity. Glial cells have long been ignored until recently it is increasingly clear that glial cells are involved in physiological and pathological conditions, such as learning & memory and neurodegenerative disorders respectively. Obesity actually is an inflammatory process, and glial cells are involved in the inflammation. They will explore the functions of glia in food intake and obesity using approaches including opto-genetics and chemical-genetics.